


less about living and more about waiting

by sketchy-and-unformed (infectedsense)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 09:00:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3061862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infectedsense/pseuds/sketchy-and-unformed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The curtains are drawn to keep out the light and part of Dean wants to tear them open to let the sun stream in because death can’t happen in the daytime. It wouldn’t have the audacity, surely, to come striding in on such a bright fall day.  But the bigger part of Dean knows the truth: that tragedy happens all day, every day.</i>
</p><p>Written to fill a prompt. Cas's grace burns out, after all. It's not pleasant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	less about living and more about waiting

And after all that the three of them have been through, it ends like this; an anonymous motel room somewhere between Lebanon and Los Angeles, crowded around a mattress beneath a nicotine-stained ceiling. The curtains are drawn to keep out the light and part of Dean wants to tear them open to let the sun stream in because death can’t happen in the daytime. It wouldn’t have the audacity, surely, to come striding in on such a bright fall day. But the bigger part of Dean knows the truth: that tragedy happens all day, every day. That death doesn’t care about bad timing. That Dean may have bargained with and gambled against the horseman before, but ultimately, he’s powerless here and now. The knowing of these things sits heavy like a stone in his belly, the weight of it threatening to drag him to his knees.

The halting, rasping breaths from the bed are almost more than he can take.

It’s the first time he’s been back in two days. He’s tripped through every bar in a ten-block radius, he’s stalked through every alleyway and empty parking lot in the dead of night searching for monsters, anything that he could fight to kill, but he turned up nothing, and all the while he was only skating around the edge of the black hole that lies here in this room. The three of them have been sealed up here for the better part of a week and it got to be too much but he’s back now. For now.

Sam is out somewhere when Dean gets back. The room is quiet and still and stepping back into it feels like drowning.

He doesn’t want to walk over to the bed but at the same time he feels like he has to. It’s what he should do and it’s where he should be. He glances over both shoulders before he crosses the room, boots scuffing over the carpet.

It’s the worst thing because it’s drawn out and slow and ordinary, but it’s still happening and he can’t stop it.

He kneels by the bed and his fingers lace together on their own, elbows on the sheets.

“If there’s anyone up there,” he starts. His lips stick to his gums and click when he speaks. He takes a deep breath and counts it out with his heartbeat from one to seven. “You can’t take him yet. Please. Don’t take him. Not yet. I’ll do anything, just—please.”

After all that the three of them have been through, it’s all he’s got left. His head drops to rest against his clasped hands, and he doesn’t even care when Sam comes back and finds him like that, on the floor, by the bed.

*

The time for action has long since passed into maddening stillness. There had been weeks of research, scouring every book in the bunker, whole days wasted on the telephone, each call ending with the same deep sigh of “Alright then, thanks anyway,” and not a single step closer to fixing it.

The grace leaking out of Cas like a star being pulled apart by its own gravity. Visible in every new line beneath his eyes, every new bruise on his skin.

Now there’s just a body on a hotel bed and a whole lot of waiting for something that none of them want to happen, but it will. It is.

Cas coughs and turns his head and Dean is there, right there. “Hey,” he says, then can’t think of anything else to add. Sam hovers uneasy in the background. Cas raises a hand to rub weakly at his eyes, coughs again.

“How much longer?” he croaks, and Dean turns away.

“We don’t know.”

“Cas, there must be something we can do,” Sam offers, although he’s said this before, daily since this started.

“No, Sam. I apologise—” a brief spell of coughing interrupts the former angel, and the Winchesters can only wait for it to pass. “I am sorry to burden you. You should be hunting, both of you, there must be something else—”

“Family comes first,” Dean says, eyes burning. Cas meets his gaze and his face seems to fall even further with what he sees there. He nods minutely.

“Understood.”

*

In the parking lot, Dean paces.

“We could have done something.”

“Dean, we tried everything. Witchcraft, demon deals, we called in every favour we had and then some. Don’t put this on yourself, man. We tried.”

Dean spins around and he’s like a wild animal, all anger and teeth.

“We should have saved him, Sam.”

Sam takes a deep breath. “We couldn’t.”

“That’s not good enough. We should have tried harder. I should have—”

Dean lets out a guttural yell and slams both fists down on the hood of the Impala, the hollow boom like punctuation to his grief. Sam is at his side in an instant, hand soothing between his shoulder blades.

“Hey, hey, hey, stop. Don’t. It’s alright, Dean. None of this is your fault.”

Dean drops his head, and he’s shaking. “Dammit, he would have saved us. If it was you in there, or me. He would have.”

“I know, Dean.” Sam turns the touch into a one-armed hug, pulling his brother in. “I hate this, too. But we can’t fight it anymore.”

“So what do we do?”

Sam looks ahead, towards the setting sun. “We just—stay here. Be here. That’s all.”

*

Three more days. That’s how long it takes. Seventy hours of barely eating, not sleeping, watching Cas fighting to cling onto life. Four thousand minutes of wearing the same clothes, not shaving.

Three days in a room that smells like death and despair.

It’s five a.m. on a Tuesday in October, Sam dozing in the other bed with his boots still on, Dean sitting next to Cas, leaning heavy against the headboard, sunrise still an hour away. Cas hasn’t moved in hours but Dean knows he hasn’t missed it, because he’d _know_. And he’s right; Cas heaves himself onto his back, breathing in little gasps.

“Soon,” he whispers, and Dean swallows.

“What can I do?”

Cas smiles. “Stop asking that question.”

A manic laugh threatens to bubble out of Dean, but in the end it’s only a shaky breath. “It shouldn’t have ended like this, man. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Dean reaches out blindly, reflexively, unknowingly, until his hand finds the angel’s in the tangle of blankets and squeezes.

“I’ll miss you, Cas. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You’ll keep going,” Cas says, eyes just barely visible in the darkness. “You will still have Sam. You will survive.”

Dean says, “But I won’t want to,” and Castiel reaches up slowly, painfully, to cup his jaw.

“I have lived for a very long time, Dean. The time I spent with you was the most enjoyable. I wanted you to know that.”

“Yeah,” Dean manages past the growing lump in his throat, the tightness in his chest. “Me too, Cas.”

“Remember that,” Cas says, voice starting to fade. “When I’m gone.” His hand slips from Dean’s face, dragging down his arm on its path to the bed. “Remember—we were happy, once.”

That’s the last thing, the final words, and even after weeks of knowing that it was going to end, Dean still isn’t ready.

His ugly, heaving sobs wake Sam in an instant, his brother scrambling to his side and hesitating there, watching Dean shaking with his head against his knees, seeing Castiel’s smooth, blank face and knowing that he’s dead. Sam reaches out with a trembling hand and draws Cas’s eyelids down, then kneels by the bed, beside Dean, in reverence for them both. Dean hiccups fast breaths and drags his arm across his face, tears stopped for now. He looks down at Sam, unwilling to look to the other side of the bed, and nods, once. Sam swallows and reaches out a hand.

“We should get going, then.”

Sam drives and Dean sleeps in the backseat. He sleeps all the way back to the bunker, and Sam is selfishly grateful even as his long legs ache and his eyes sting after seven hours on the road, because to have to see the look in Dean’s eyes now, that haunted, broken look that’s been building for days, would have been unbearable.

In the daylight outside the front door, Dean blinks and shuffles his feet, turning to Sam.

“You know how I—that we—”

“Yeah,” Sam says, chest aching, face hot. “I know.”

Dean rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck, plasters on a smile.

“So. Back to business, right?”

“Right,” Sam says. Then, “I think there’s beer in the fridge.”

“Oh thank God,” Dean says.


End file.
